Gyles Brandreth: How Christmas jumpers made me a style icon

"I am happy to see the world catching up", says knitwear pioneer Gyles
Brandreth who charts the evolution of seasonal knitting from geek to chic

A close-knit family: Gyles and his daughter Saethryd share a passion for knitwear.Photo: Clara Molden

By Gyles Brandreth

10:49AM GMT 10 Dec 2014

Have you got your Christmas jumper? Not yet? Don’t worry, you can always borrow one of mine. I’ve got 37 of them – 38 if you count the one featuring the red-nosed poodle everyone seems to think is Rudolph.

It appears the whole world is into seasonal knitwear these days. “Christmas jumper” was one of the most searched terms on Google last year and shops are reporting that sales of festive pullies are already way up on 2013.

You'll be reckoned a sad sight this Yuletide if you find yourself under the mistletoe not decked out in a gaudy novelty knit featuring Santa or a snowman or – wait for it: I have seen this, I promise – a baby Jesus peeping out of a kangaroo’s pouch. Christmas jumpers are EVERYWHERE.

I am happy to see the world catching up. The fact is I have been into seasonal knitting for about 60 years. My heyday was the Eighties when I appeared almost daily on daytime television dressed in a colourful cardie, jersey, guernsey or tank top and was described (by The Sun) as “the Jumping Jack Flash of jolly jumpers”.

Then, from what I can recall, my taste in pullovers wasn’t universally admired. Now, it’s all the rage. This week, on a London bus, a tattooed young woman from Hoxton said to me, out of the blue, “I want to look like you. You’re my style icon.”

You couldn’t make it up and I didn’t. The evidence is all around us. Among the cool and the hip, from the country-house crowd to the metropolitan twerking classes, Brandreth-style knitwear is as de rigueur in the run-up to the Christmas party season as a sea captain’s beard and a waxed moustache in Movember.

Of course, the craft of knitting has been part of civilised life for at least a thousand years. From fragments of material unearthed by archaeologists, we know they were knitting socks in Egypt in the 11th century. We know, too, they were knitting caps for babies in Spain in the 12th century. The association between knitting and Christmas dates from the 14th century when we begin to see paintings of the expectant Virgin Mary holding knitting needles: my favourite is Our Lady Knitting by Tommaso da Modena, 1325-75.

Then and now: Gyles' love affair with novelty knitwear goes way back

What has been fashionable in knitwear has varied down the years. Once upon a time, people mostly knitted stockings and socks, shawls and scarves, pretty clothes for babies and hardy sweaters for sailors. In the Twenties the future King Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales, made Fair Isle fashionable wearing knitted jumpers to play golf – and to look natty round the fireside at Fort Belvedere on Boxing Day after the shoot. (His Royal Highness also wore knitted ties.) In the Fifties, Hollywood royalty – including Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly (who went on to become European royalty as Princess Grace of Monaco) – wore sparkly knitted “twinsets” for the holiday season, while their male counterparts – notably crooners like Bing Crosby and Perry Como – started sporting knitted sweaters featuring Yuletide motifs in their television Christmas specials.

Back in the day: Gyles sporting a pompom-laden knit

According to my mother, who was brought up in Canada between the wars (and for whom Bing Crosby was Christmas), the Christmas jumper is a North American phenomenon that we’ve imported – like Hallowe’en trick-or-treating and Black Friday. In America in the Thirties, people knitted for economy as much as style, but to lift their spirits as well as to keep themselves warm during the privations of the Depression winters, they started to copy the styles of their big-screen, radio and television idols, and to create home-made knitwear featuring simple festive motifs.

It was in the Fifties that I first started knitting. As a Cub Scout of six or seven I was taught to knit and awarded a knitting badge as proof of my skill. In the early Seventies I founded the National Scrabble Championships and, on the day of the finals, a friend brought me a bright yellow jersey with a full-colour life-size Scrabble board emblazoned on the chest. The garment changed my life.

From that day on, colourful jumpers became my professional trademark. Whenever I appeared on television I wore a different one. I had hundreds, mostly designed by myself, and I had them for all occasions – featuring hearts for Valentine’s Day, daffodils for St David’s Day, Shakespeare on his birthday, Winnie the Pooh on mine. For the Christmas season I ran riot. To take me through from the Feast of Saint Nicholas to Twelfth Night I had a wardrobe crammed with possibilities: my favourites featured a snowman with a detachable scarf and a Christmas tree with real baubles.

A bearfaced love of knitwear: Gyles modellinga novelty knit

In 1990, when I gave up television for politics, I assumed I could leave the jolly jumpers behind. Wrong. In my constituency, whenever I did my best to seem statesmanlike, the local newspaper would manage to come up with an old photograph of me in a fun knit with which to adorn its front page. At Westminster, I was appointed to the standing committee overseeing the legislation to privatise the railways. Leading for the Opposition on the committee was John Prescott, MP. Whenever I got up to speak, he muttered in my direction: “Woolly jumper! Woolly jumper!” Eventually I had to point out to him that the joy of a woolly jumper is that you can take it off at will, whereas the blight of a woolly mind is that you are lumbered with it for life.

Of course, Mr Prescott got the last laugh because, in time, he became deputy prime minister and I didn’t. But I’ve no regrets. My jumper years were good ones. For a decade and more I wore novelty knitwear by day and night. (I even had a red-and-white-striped knitted nightgown, with knitted nightcap to match.) I published knitting books and magazines. I judged knitting competitions. I opened knitting shows. I was a director of a chain of 30 wool shops.

And then it stopped. I wasn’t wearing the jumpers anymore and nor was anyone else.

And now they’re back. Why? Partly, I think, it’s nostalgia: a longing for the cosy simplicities of yesteryear. It may have something to do with Colin Firth, too. You recall the 2001 film of Bridget Jones’s Diary and the moment when Firth, as Mr Darcy, turns around to reveal he is wearing a reindeer jumper that his mum has bought him? You just can’t help loving a man like that. He’s clearly decent, but he’s clearly got a sense of humour, too.

Like father, like daughter: a love of knitwear runs in the family

When my children were younger they had mixed feelings about my jumpers. “Oh, Dad, must you?” was a question my daughter, Saethryd, asked plaintively and all too often as I pulled on yet another brightly coloured Christmas creation. Twenty-five years on, now that Snoop Dogg, Cheryl Cole, Harry Styles and Kanye West, among others, are sporting Christmas novelty knits with pride and aplomb, Saethryd and I have created a novelty knitting book together.

Saethryd is a young mum now and she maintains that the new popularity of the Christmas knit is akin to the renewed interest in baking and sewing. “It’s part of the 'retro’ thing,” she says, “the new-found love of craft and thrift-store chic and ugly shoes.” According to Saethryd, “Designer clothes look crass when so many are struggling, as does looking like you care too much, or that you bought your style lock, stock and barrel from a fashion magazine. With a Christmas jumper you can just be you.”